The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘I am no tropical girl. I am from almost a cold climate just like London. Sometimes in Tsingtao snow falls in winter and makes it beautiful when I am a baby. So I have only small cold hole.’

  ‘Well, I can warm it up for you. If there’s any snow up there, I guarantee to melt it.’

  She pretended to become indignant. ‘Oh, you speak so filthy! What you do in my bed here, you foreign devil rapist-soldier? Get out or I call my auntie! I do not want that dirty big thing up my body or I catch a filthy disease and die, all my flesh fall off my bones.’

  What are you talking about? I gave it a wash before I came out, scrubbed it with a scrubbing brush. It’s as clean as could be. I soaped it very carefully under the shower and told it that it would be seeing you this evening – at which news it pricked up its ears immediately.’

  She smothered a laugh in her hand. ‘You are mad, you know, really? A grown man to talk with his penis like that. Twenty-three years old! I bet I know what you did, I bet! You gave yourself a good hand-wanking in the shower, isn’t that right?’ By way of illustration, she ran her fingers down my stem as if playing a flute.

  ‘Is that what Chinese men do?’

  ‘All the time, all Chinese man, and they don’t care who sees, hand-wanking every day, even inside the fields and paddy-fields. Is disgusting, yes?’

  ‘I don’t believe a word of it. Only Europeans and Americans wank themselves off. So I’m told. You are a liar, Margey! What about Chinese girls? Do they get up to the same dirty tricks, tickling their sly little clitorises? I believe you told me but I’ve forgotten the details.’

  She set down her cup and waved a finger at me. ‘You are typical absolute foreign devil, always thinking every bad thing is invented in London. Gunpowder and writing and hand-wanking are all invented in China, every bit – in Shantung Province, very likely. But China girls they no do hand-wanking.’ She laughed, flashing her beautiful teeth and eyes. ‘They have other naughty habit. I tell you what they do …’

  She put her arms round my neck and snuggled down with me until our heads were on the pillow, and her tits on my chest, when she began whispering hotly in my ear – ending by jabbing her tongue into it. The essence of her rude little story, which she liked to tell me, often with amazing embellishments, was that girls in Shantung Province, from an early age, resorted to gherkins, graduating to successively larger and more knobbly ones as they grew up. Grabbing my fingers, pretending they were gherkins, she demonstrated to me exactly how the manoeuvre was carried out, giggling and squirming as she did so.

  That was one of Margey’s favourite ploys and, before it became too much for me and I flung myself upon her, she was off in the series of delighted writhes and squeaks which marked her orgasm. To plunge into that sumptuous hole while it was in the throes was my pleasure. Margey squealed and locked her legs round the top of my thighs, under my buttocks. Our bodies became one plunging machine which worked without our volition, powered by sweat and magic. Joy, joy, the whole spirit was bursting upwards like a waterspout!

  We lay in each other’s arms, breathing easily and sweating together.

  Despite all the hardships she had undergone, Margey was quite plump. Still round her meaty little waist were the marks of the elastic of her knickers.

  As I lay with my head on her belly, I caught the aroma of that little bivalve between her thighs. It reminded me of fresh-caught lobster, of the tang of the primordial ocean in which first life was born. With its salts and chemicals, here was where sentient things gave their earliest twitch, long before land took shape.

  I could see her face in the half-dark. The bridge of her nose was flat, but the wings of her nostrils, the chiselling of her mouth, the curve of her eyes as they moulded into her cheeks – these things moved me and filled my thoughts with their perfection. Never had I known an English girl I thought half as lovely.

  The potence of her attraction lay in her not being English: in her being, not only Margey, but Cathay, far Cathay.

  Gazing up at the mottled ceiling, Margey said in a level voice, ‘Nex’ Monday morning, you go Singapore – leave Medan for ever, and catch the big steamer for London. Your poor dear Margey will be broken-hearted. How you think she live in Medan without you?’

  I slapped a mosquito which had zoomed in on my arm.

  ‘My soldiering days are done. I have to go home … I don’t want to leave Medan or you.’

  ‘Then why you go?’ she asked sulkily. It was a question she had asked before, a question I had endeavoured to answer before.

  This time I was spared, at least for the moment. A footfall sounded, the ladder to the attic creaked. I became aware of the world outside; rain was falling, breaking through the oppressive heat. The climber emerged on the landing beyond our room, and a cautious female voice called in Cantonese.

  I could distinguish Margey’s Chinese name, Tung Su Chi.

  She called a brief answer, propping herself up on an elbow.

  The other woman entered the adjoining cubicle. A faint light showed on the ceiling above the bed where we lay, framed in giant shadows thrown by the top of the partition. The woman sighed heavily as she sank down on her bed. Daisy had come home.

  Whispers, faint soggy noises, the smack of a wet breast, told us that she had her baby with her and was nursing it.

  Daisy was no relation of Margey’s. She was simply one of the people who found refuge under this particular roof until affairs in Sumatra took a turn for the better. She spoke no English, so there was never any contact between us. All day she left her baby in the care of old Auntie downstairs while she worked on a nearby farm, returning only in the evening. Daisy had no husband and the baby was half Japanese. She and Margey were – in Margey’s words – ‘friendly but no too friendly.’

  ‘She’s late – it’s nearly curfew,’ I whispered to Margey. ‘How about a drink?’

  Margey would not be deflected. Wrapping a sheet round her body, she got up and closed the window against the rain. She had propped it open before joining me on the bed. Then she turned and looked at me, her face in shadow, her eyes dark, the smooth line of her shoulder gleaming in the lamplight.

  ‘Take me to London with you, Horry. You see, I will be good girl, not tease you or sleep with other man, I promise. London good prace. I dress very beautiful in latest fashion, become great fashion sensation like Rita Hayworth.’

  I sat up impatiently.

  ‘Margey, darling, we’ve been through all this. You know I can’t take you with me.’

  ‘Is impossible you jus’ vanish next Monday. How can bear that, Horry?’

  ‘I don’t know how we’ll bear it, Margey. I can’t stand the thought of it even now. It’s just one of those shitty things that will have to happen. My time’s up.’

  Rain was falling more heavily. It drummed on the tiles overhead. Water started to splash heavily on the landing beyond our door. Giving me a hard look to keep me going for the moment, Margey padded out barefoot and set a bowl under the drip. Immediately, a steady ping-ping-ping began.

  Marching back into the room, Margey took up her position by the lamp, folded her arms, and said, ‘You very deceive your Margey – you got other girl-friend in London, you sweaty swine. Is that girl Sonia you tell me about. The one with the freckles.’

  ‘I told you, I’ve had one month in England during the last five years. It’s a fucking foreign country as far as I’m concerned. All the girls I once knew are probably married and toothless old hags by now.’

  ‘Sonia got terrible disease by now.’ She spoke with vindictive pleasure.

  ‘Yeah, well … maybe. Babies at least – already learning to shave.’

  Instead of laughing, she renewed her pleas. A moth came over the top of the partition like a flung duster and settled on her bare shoulder. Margey ignored it.

  ‘You take me with you London, darling. You and me very good each other, all time have fun and make love. How you think you can live in foreign country without me?’

&nb
sp; ‘Don’t cry, Margey. Honestly, I think about the problem all the time. I don’t know what to do. Try to understand. My time is up. Christ … All my mates think I’m mad because I don’t want to go back to the Blight. My time is up, I’m time-expired. I’ve served my seven years and I’ve got to return to Civvy Street. That’s orders. I couldn’t live on in Medan even if I wanted to.’

  She put her hands up to her cheeks, gazing down at her toes. The moth crawled on to her neck and she brushed it away. Rain fell solidly outside as if it would not be content until it broke down every rotten roof in Medan. Our small lamp-lit drama was wrapped about in liquid sound.

  Margey suddenly climbed back on the bed, wrapped the sheet about us both, and tucked my shrivelled prick into the palm of her hand.

  She spoke confidentially, as if she did not wish Daisy to hear.

  ‘One man tell me you can get army discharge in Singapore. Singapore belong Britain. Prenty British in Singapore. You get job in big firm like Cable & Wireless for good pay. I come along too, look after you, like first-class China wife.’

  Speaking, her face filled with the vision of us together in a place at peace, and she smiled, showing those delicious teeth. At the same time, she gave my prick a playful squeeze.

  I lay back, staring at the lamp on the sill with the packet of Bird’s Custard Powder beside it. If only Margey would shut up …

  ‘Who told you I could get demobbed in Singapore, Johnny Mercer?’ It was a possibility I had never mentioned to her.

  Instead of answering the question, she bent and kissed my idling organ.

  ‘I show you many pleasure in Singapore. Is great good city, maybe next best in the world after Tsingtao and Peking and London and Paris. We can have much fun. Horry, you know, all time go many parties, live in big new flats now they build in Bukit Timah Road. I not tease you or look at any other man. Do you hear? No feel any penis except this lovely one all the time.’

  It at least began to show enthusiasm for the proposed regime.

  ‘I’ve got to get back to my fucking family, Margey. Orders are orders. I can’t explain. It’s how things are. I don’t run the bloody world … Listen to that fucking rain …’

  ‘Fuck the fucking rain!’ Margey looked angrily at me, pulling her ugly Temple Watchdog face. She knew I dreaded her temper. ‘Why you mention about your family? You no care them – you bad drunk son! You never write any letter your mother or papa. We go Singapore, just you and I, then I learn speak much more good English and love you every way, like a slave, okay? That really is best for you, I know.’ She struck her bosom angrily. ‘My god, Singapore is lucky place of the Far East.’

  That was a matter of opinion, though it was hardly the moment to argue with her. As far as the British were concerned, the whole disaster of Singapore stood out as a prime example of their failure to understand or care about any race East of India. During the nineteen-thirties, it had been fortified up to the eyeballs so as to be impregnable from the sea; in the nineteen-forties, the Japanese walked in through the back door and the Singapore garrison feebly surrendered. They surrendered to an enemy they had always regarded with contempt, a race of little men hardly worth fighting.

  I had personal feelings about Singapore. When 2 Div finally pulled out of Burma, the Mendips had been given five weeks’ rest in Calcutta, and then our brigade had moved to Madras to undergo amphibious training with 26 Div. We were limbering up for the infamous Operation Zipper; our task was to take the impregnable Singapore from the Japanese by seaborne invasion! Bloody madness. Fortunately, Harry Truman got his finger out and dropped the A-bomb in the nick of time. We were spared our seaborne massacre and shipped over to Sumatra to repatriate Japs instead.

  The war had been mad enough, with its interlocking maze of arbitrary decisions, but it was merely a consequence of the lunatic peace which had preceded it. What vain hopes Singapore represented in that direction! Its fortifications cost the British taxpayer twenty million pounds sterling, a fortune indeed in the twenties; and in the very week when those fortifications were started and the first stone laid, the financial wizards in London lent the Japs twenty-five million pounds sterling to build a navy with which to destroy Singapore and the rest of Britain’s power in the East. What a masterpiece of imperial idiocy! No wonder we lost the bloody empire!

  Well, I write this a long time later, and Singapore, that elegant rat-race, has now gone its own way, free of British control. I have the advantage of hindsight. But it’s easy enough to see how such lunacies repeat themselves. The Soviet powers build up their vast armaments steadily year by year, while the West subsidises them to do so; Poland alone has been given (‘lent’ is the technical term) millions of deutschmarks with which to buy agricultural machinery. When the Warsaw Pact countries attack us, we shall all be astonished and indignant, forgetting how for years we have been sharpening the razors with which they cut our throats. Every decade, the distinction between war and peace becomes less, their yin-yang relationship more obvious.

  But all I said to Margey at the time, as she clutched my prick and the moth singed itself on her lamp, was, ‘Fuck Singapore!’

  She began to sob – another liquid sound far more noticeable than the others surrounding us.

  ‘Oh, pack it in, Margey. I love you but my fucking time is up. It’ll break my heart to leave you but that’s the way it is. Kismet.’ Checking my watches, I worked out that it must be eleven o’clock, give or take ten minutes. The rain was dying out.

  Margey turned away from me and curled up in a foetal position, still sniffing.

  ‘You say you love your Margey, so you say. You say you like be in the East, so you say. Then why you go England? Now you must decide! For safety sake, since Medan is so dangerous, we go Singapore short time, okay, you and I? Later time, when Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek throw out the rebels from China and law-and-order come back, then I take you Shantung, show you Tsingtao. We can go on the railway train! I have a pre-war timetable in my trunk. Is easy journey!’ She sat up, smiling again, stretching out her arms as if to embrace all China. ‘Aei-ya, Horry, just you think! You can see the Yellow Sea and those occasional beaches like I told you, with all the trees with flowers on when spring comes down from the mountains. I bet you like that, Horry, I really bet!’

  ‘Yeah, I would.’

  Yeah, I would like it. Sweat rash apart, yes, I loved the East: I loved the extraordinary people, the muddle, the failure, the hope, the climate, the ghastliness, the perennial courage, the lack of pretension. Everything was much more real and exciting than anything I had known in England. But …

  And Margey. Temper apart, yes, I loved Margey. She was so vulnerable, yet so bouncy, oppressed yet serene. She embodied in her frail plump self the whole teeming confused Chinese nation, that extraordinary half of the globe, that secret and alluring half, which existed almost like a female counterpart to the gun-toting, overcoat-clad West. Passionately, I longed to know her and, through her, her people better. I longed to dive deeper and not be jerked suddenly out of context like a carp out of a pool. But …

  ‘Oh, you so insc’utable! You say nothing!’ She kicked her savage little feet under the cover. ‘You say you love me, you no love me – jus’ because I China girl, I got yellow skin, you fool ignorant soldier!’

  ‘That’s all balls, Margey. Look, you are far paler than me.’ To make her look, I stripped the sheet back. There lay our bodies, soon to be divided for ever unless I got a fucking move on, lying together on the same bed, knees touching. I struck out angrily at a mosquito feasting on my leg, and left a smear of blood. Years of sun in India, Burma, and Sumatra had toasted my torso to a dark mahogany. From the waist up, I would have passed for a Dravidian on his annual holiday in Bermuda. By contrast, Margey’s soft figure was as tallowy as the sheet beneath us. I slid my hand between her legs, clutching the lips of her twot. ‘China girl skin like ivory. Horry love his China girl.’

  With spirit, she said, ‘You no go with Katie Chae or I die. That g
irl got bad terrible disease.’

  ‘Horry love this China girl.’

  ‘Stink-pig, no make fun how I speak! If you try speak Shantung dialect, I make fun you, you foreign devil, you take your filthy disease hand out my cunt fast, or I scream for Daisy.’

  Laughing, I overcame her resistance and kissed her. You were full of hope in those days, dear Margey, as I was. Have you lost it all by now, and the years ground you down?

  At the time, I told myself that I still had a chance to make up my mind and to plan accordingly. Matters could be arranged. I would have to get military permission to marry Margey; otherwise, there was no way in which she could leave Sumatra. ‘Do you, Horatio Stubbs, take this China girl, Tung Su Chi, to be your lawful wedded wife?’ Then we could get to Singapore at least. Not that I wanted to stay in Singapore … There was India, but India was passing from British hands. And in England – I flinched to think of the cretinous reception Margey might receive there; the attitude of my mates in the mess gave me warning enough on that score.

  In order to arrange anything, I had to get in touch with Captain Maurice Boyer, my company officer. I had left it a bit late, because Boyer was not in Medan. He was in Padang, on the other side of the island, and I would have to speak to him over the air.

  There was another difficulty, which I had often tried to explain to Margey, who steadfastly refused to believe a word of all the unlikely formalities which constituted army regulations. I was in Medan on detachment from the Mendips. My battalion was stationed down in Padang, four hundred or so miles away, the other two battalions of 8 Brigade having been shifted to Batavia in Java, where the British and the Dutch were having more trouble than in Sumatra. Major Inskipp had recently been repatriated. Now it was the eccentric Boyer I had to speak to, and I knew how difficult it was to hold personal discussions over a wireless link.

  One other possibility existed. I could talk to Captain Jhamboo Singh, the dandified officer under whose supervision I came officially whilst in Medan. He was perfectly capable of taking decisions, being Commanding Officer of the British personnel of 26 Div and such odd bods as me. But I failed to visualise how I could talk to an Indian about my chances of marrying a Chinese girl.